2 Responses to “Aaron Swartz’s legacy”

[…] code of ethics that tells me that aside from trespass (which I can’t endorse, any more than does Stuart Shieber) I belonged in Swartz’s position—it’s my job to “advocate balance between the interests of […]

Like many, I have been reflecting deeply on the implications of Swartz’s actions, and I was only recently struck by something that seems worth noting, as it has not been discussed elsewhere.

In his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” Swartz specifically states that his project of uploading materials refers to works that are “out of copyright,” and in numerous statements elsewhere he states that he is a strong believer in copyright protection.

This doesn’t seem to have registered with commentators prior to the events of 2011, and no doubt Swartz himself is partly to blame, as he had a tendency to formulate even the most moderate of visions in radical terms (part of his brilliance).

My guess is that he never at any point intended to distribute anything that was copyright-protected. His idea, I think was to upload public domain materials, and the “secret archives” seem to refer to the government archives which he made publicly available just a few months later. These materials were not really secret, they were just behind a paywall, so calling them secret was a bit rhetorical. This act of his–not the JSTOR incident–is widely regarded as a public service that didn’t have negative consequences. I don’t think his idea in the manifesto was to encourage people to violate any federal law.

Alas, Swartz was never given the chance to explain himself. But this reading seems to me consistent with his writings and lectures.